WHAT WERE WE THINKING?: When newspaper mistakes happen in large type

Newspapers make mistakes every day. How we set the record straight - or fail to do so - can be critical to public dialogue about an issue and our credibility as journalists.

There's a place for corrections in each day's Register Citizen.

But what responsibility do we have, what should we do, if the mistake was more prominent than small type on the op-ed page can rectify?

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Last week, we wrote about the fact that federal regulations governing Charlotte Hungerford Hospital's new partnership with Yale-New Haven Hospital will require that the Center for Cancer Care on Kennedy Drive in Torrington be relocated.

We think that's an interesting and important story for a number of reasons. Although we understand why the regulations are in place - to prevent hospitals from building expensive, duplicative services in each other's markets at greater overall cost to the health care system - they are cookie cutter and can have unintended consequences when applied the same in a compact, small state such as Connecticut and one with vast geography such as Montana or Utah.

The plan to move the cancer center was part of Charlotte Hungerford's original announcement of the partnership, but it was downplayed, and the reason why not revealed.

So we set out to write about the government's rule that any joint cancer center that Charlotte Hungerford and Yale-New Haven would operate to serve residents of the Torrington area be located "within 35 miles" of Yale-New Haven's home base of York Street in New Haven.

And that's where we made the error that has me writing today about how the newspaper handles mistakes.

When we learned about the 35-mile rule, the immediate question was where that would place a new cancer center.

Here's the part that's damn embarrassing, especially for me, because it was my mistake. As we were talking to the reporter who was working on the story, I went to a highway map, charted the distance between York Street in New Haven and Kennedy Drive, said, "Hey, that's 44 miles. This would put the location somewhere around Thomaston."

That generated a headline in the next morning's Register Citizen: "Cancer center leaving town," on page one, in very large headline type.

A short time after that hit the street, I learned that the federal "35-mile rule" is interpreted "as the crow flies," not via highway.

That means the new cancer center could, in fact, be located "in town." The 35-mile radius encompasses part of Torrington's South End, as well as Litchfield and points south.

So dumb. And it exposed our failure to check that premise with the hospital, to use additional sources familiar with the law, etc.

We changed the story appearing on RegisterCitizen.Com shortly after learning about the error on Tuesday morning. We also corrected our use of the word "merger" to refer to what both sides call a "letter of intent" to "partner," not merge, cancer services.

(And yup, that was my error, too. Added in an editing of the reporter's story as we sought to write a snappy lead.)

Per our corrections policy, we didn't just fix the article and pretend that we never made the mistake in the first place. We noted at the end of the story what we had gotten wrong and how we had updated the story to fix the problem.

Our policy also calls for a correction to run in the print edition if the story ran in print. So we prepared a detailed correction of what we got wrong and what we should have said. It was scheduled to appear in the usual place for corrections, in a small box on the op-ed page.

But there's another best practice of correcting yourself - one rarely followed by media organizations, including ours, I'm afraid. And that's to correct the error as prominently and through the same channels as you made the error. For example, if you post about it on Facebook, correct it on Facebook. If you send it out as a text message, correct it in a text message.

This particular error - one that immediately started readers complaining about why the hospital would make cancer treatment less convenient for local residents and move jobs out of Torrington - happened above the fold on the front page.

So we made the decision to run a more detailed correction on the front page, above the fold, in Wednesday's print edition.

I can't remember doing that before in my time at The Register Citizen. But if we make a mistake like that again, we should again.

Matt DeRienzo is group editor of Journal Register Co.'s newspapers in Connecticut, including The Register Citizen, New Haven Register and The Middletown Press. Email him at mderienzo@journalregister.com.